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What are the elements that play a role in launching a marketing campaign?
Let's remember a brief definition: a marketing campaign is a short-term communication plan that involves the use of various channels to achieve specific sales objectives. Its purpose is therefore to engage the audience and influence them towards making a purchase.
The goal of this work is, in general, to identify relevant advertising activities and media for the product, integrated in such a way as to achieve the predefined objectives and reach customers effectively. A successful plan implies an engaging, shareable marketing concept that uses online and offline communication tools and, of course, social media.
What are the elements that play a role in launching a marketing campaign?
Marketing activities require careful planning, so that each phase of the process has been evaluated before the launch. Since an advertising campaign consists solely of pure tactics and is entirely based on projects, it is necessary to align the process of initial promotional choices with the final result. Here are the main points to reflect on:
- Choose your target audience: who are you interested in attracting?
- Set your goals and KPI: what do you want to achieve with this campaign and how will you measure the results?
- Determine your offer: what incentive will attract their attention?
- Identify your channels: which elements do you intend to involve to promote this offer?
- Create the homepage of your website: what will the visitor's experience be?
- Care for communication: how do you want to help and encourage your customers in their purchasing journey?
- Monitor the results: what will be the parameters of success?
Choose your target audience.
Before you can choose what and where for your marketing campaign, you need to determine who your target audience is and how you want to reach them.
I bet you’re saying, "Yes, but we’ve already defined our target audience in our marketing plan!" In theory, sure. But let’s assume you offer two services: coaching for independent professionals and consulting for small businesses with up to 20 employees. Which of these two audience segments will you target for this campaign?
The best way to reach this differentiated audience is to understand their particular needs and how to address them. Define your customer in detail to help you refine your messaging based on their specific needs. You will likely want to create a separate marketing campaign for the other target as well.
Set your goals and KPIs.
Marketing activities can have different types of results: revenue, visitors, visibility, or engagement. Each marketing campaign should focus on a primary goal. Based on that goal, it is necessary to set specific objectives and metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you determine the performance of your campaign against the goal you have set.
For example, if your campaign focuses on generating revenue, how much do you want to generate and how will you determine the success of these results?
Determine your offer.
Depending on the campaign, your offer could be content, a free webinar, a free trial, or something that attracts those who want to purchase your brand. These offers must appeal to the buyer and stand out from others of the same type.
Offering a free one-hour webinar to people who do not know your brand or are not interested in buying anything could be a waste of time. Providing a helpful and concise guide is always the best presentation for your brand. Make sure to align your offer with something you know your target audience needs.
Identify your channel.
Which marketing communication channel will you use to convey your message and attract and capture your audience? Your online and digital channels may include:
- Websites (blog, custom website);
- Social media (Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, Snapchat, 21Buttons);
- Email, newsletters;
- Apps created specifically;
- Search engines;
- Videos on Youtube.
Depending on your business, you might include some traditional communication channels such as direct mail, advertising in local listings, website banners, signage on transportation like trucks, and networking events.
The chosen channels will vary based on the product, target audience, and objectives.
Monitor and calculate the results.
It is important to keep track of marketing activities and calculate the results. They will be determined by what your goals were for the campaign. But in most cases, the results are generally in terms of sales or qualified leads.
Tracking and measuring results can be simple or complex, but it depends on the nature of your business. In its simplest form, you can measure the cost per lead if you have the details of how much you spend on lead generation. In the more complex measurement arena, you can track the influence of marketing on closed business using marketing automation software.
After completing the cycle of a marketing campaign, ask the following questions during the review:
- Did you achieve the goals? If not, why?
- Did your offer meet your target audience? If not, what can you offer?
- Should anything be changed the next time you launch the campaign?
- What have you learned that you can apply to your next campaign for this target audience?
Launching a marketing campaign is not something you can do quickly and get immediate results. Every initiative must be planned and carefully tested before starting the campaign to ensure that marketing activities are effective and generate a solid ROI (return on investment).
Effective monitoring of a marketing plan ensures that your investment is not wasted; without knowing how effective each strategy is, you could be throwing away money on unnecessary efforts. As you plan and execute a marketing plan, build monitoring tools from the start and be ruthless in eliminating strategies that are not worth the time and money spent to create them. With a traditional evaluation program, you can achieve an efficient and powerful marketing system.
The most commonly used tools for monitoring a campaign: Google Analytics and personalized discount codes.
Choose the appropriate monitoring tools for each strategy in your marketing plan. List all the marketing objectives planned for the next year and find the tools that will help you monitor their effectiveness. For web-based initiatives, consult website analytics programs like Google Analytics; for discounts, you can use different promotional codes for each place where you advertise.
Use technology to avoid making great efforts in monitoring.
Before launching a new campaign, also implement monitoring tools. Insert a script that can help you in the HTML code of your website, for example, or set up a spreadsheet to track sales progress. Treat evaluation and monitoring as integral parts of the marketing process and assign one of your marketing staff to this specific task.
Speak directly with sales staff to understand the key moments of a product's success.
Track sales performance before and after the launch of a marketing campaign. Since the ultimate goal of marketing is often to increase sales, keep an eye on how each event impacts sales. Ask the sales staff for specific feedback on the number of specific revenues that come in after a new promotion and ask them to inquire with customers about how they found your company to get more detailed results.
How to monitor customer emotions and brand awareness?
Talk to your customers to study in real-time the marketing commitments that are difficult to monitor quantitatively, such as awareness, gauging customer sentiment, and members of the target audience who are not yet loyal. Send simple emails about social media profiles and publish blogs and informative content on your website. Plan questions that will provide you with specific information related to the success of your marketing campaign: for example, customer awareness of new features or awareness of the environmental efforts your company is making to achieve a sustainable ecosystem.
Clean up: remove what is not needed.
On the other hand, eliminate ineffective marketing strategies. To make your monitoring efforts useful and simplify the marketing plan, cut projects that do not meet their initial goals. Pay particular attention to strategies that cost a large amount of money to ensure that what is invested is truly useful and not a colossal flop. Analyze your marketing plan so that it contains only the most effective activities, which will leave room for new efforts. In general, the biggest trend is to use social media sponsorship (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube): it doesn't cost much, unless you choose to employ people with a very large following, and it usually tends to achieve great visibility. Thanks to this strategy, it is also possible to monitor revenues per social media, clicks to the website, or the use of the discount code given to each influencer.
An example: Coca-Cola's "share a Coke" campaign.
Few years ago, Coca-Cola launched its "Share A Coke" campaign in the United States, using 250 of the most common American names to market its product to individual consumers.
The campaign seems to have been a huge success with the stars and stripes audience, and it led to its extension to the rest of the world.
According to the Wall Street Journal, over 125,000 social media posts referenced "Share A Coke" between June and July 2014, and 12% of online interactions about Coca-Cola at that time can be attributed to the campaign. Additionally, over 353,000 virtual bottles of the famous drink were shared through the specially created website for the occasion.
Another measure of the success of this campaign is extremely visible once the data for the Coca-Cola brand is examined in Google Trends. After being launched in the United States, in fact, "Share a Coke" gained increasing attention. The search term "share a coke" saw a significant increase in Google searches in the United States over a short period of three months, from June to August of the same year.
What can we learn from this campaign?
One of the reasons why "Share a Coke" has been so successful is because it appeals directly to individual consumers. What better way to grab someone's attention than to put their name directly on your product?
Of course, this is not a realistic strategy - or even an optimal strategy - for many companies, but it is important to always consider how your campaign will be perceived on an individual level.
Another aspect that makes this advertising method so memorable and effective is its ability to adapt to narrative structures. That is to say, this campaign offers endless storytelling possibilities when it is sponsored. And since advertisements that try to tell a story are likely to be more effective because they are easier to remember, this has been a great advantage for Coca-Cola.
When designing your next advertising campaign, in short, think immediately about the narrative potential of the campaign.
To conclude
In conclusion, every decision-making strategy in a marketing campaign revolves around the product and how it is intended to be represented to the public. Once the brand identity is defined, it is then necessary to understand exactly the profile of the target audience and the various integrated ways that can be used to reach them effectively. The case of Coca-Cola's "Share a Coke" campaign shows how reaching individual people is an effective method in the field of marketing, resulting in greater ease in monitoring its success online.
Author: Alessio Hocevar
DIGITAL MEDIA MANAGER
Doctor Alessio Hocevar, our expert in SEA (Search Engine Advertising), SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and SMO (Social Media Optimization), graduated in Communication Sciences and Technologies. He also deals with copywriting, email marketing, and video marketing. Certified in Google Ads Fundamentals and Google Shopping.